The burn and the boggy carse south of Stirling where Robert the Bruce destroyed Edward II’s army on 23 and 24 June 1314: ground chosen for the road it blocked, a battlefield whose exact position is still argued over, and the site of the Borestone, the 1870 flagpole, the Rotunda and Pilkington Jackson’s equestrian Bruce.
Bannockburn is the name of a stream and of the country it drains, immediately south of Stirling. The Bannock Burn rises in the Gargunnock and Touch hills and runs east into the River Forth, and for most of its lower course it is cut into a steep, wooded ravine before it reaches the flat ground of the carse. The old road from Falkirk to Stirling had to cross it, which is what brought two armies to the place in the summer of 1314.
The Battle of Bannockburn was fought over two days, 23 and 24 June 1314, and ended with Edward II’s army broken and the king himself carried off the field. This article is about the ground rather than the fighting: the burn, the carse, the argument over where the armies actually stood, and the monuments raised on the site five and six centuries afterwards.
Two watercourses shape the site. The Bannock Burn runs along its southern edge, and the smaller Pelstream Burn joins the Forth a little to the north; between them lies a tongue of ground that narrows as it goes east. West of the modern village the burn is deeply incised, with banks that a mounted man cannot ride down and up; east of it the land falls away into the carse, the flat alluvial floor of the Forth valley, which in the fourteenth century was undrained, seamed with tidal creeks called pows, and soft enough to founder a horse.
Above the carse stands a low plateau, the Dryfield of Balquhiderock, with a wooded scarp along its eastern lip. The contrast between the two is the whole military point of the place: firm, dry ground where a formation could stand, and wet ground on three sides where cavalry could neither deploy nor escape. Barbour’s verse life of Bruce, written in the 1370s, and the English Vita Edwardi Secundi both remember the ground before they remember the manoeuvres.
Stirling was the crossing of the Forth. Below it the river was tidal and unbridged, above it lay the hills, so an army moving between Lothian and the north had little choice but to pass the castle rock, and the road from the south ran up through the Torwood and over the Bannock Burn. Whoever held Stirling Castle held the waist of Scotland, which is why the same few square miles drew the fighting of the Battle of Stirling Bridge in 1297 and again in 1314.
In 1313 Edward Bruce, the king’s brother, agreed with the English constable of Stirling, Philip Mowbray, that the castle would be surrendered if no English army came within three leagues of it by midsummer 1314. That bargain set the date and the place. Robert the Bruce took position in the New Park, a royal hunting wood on the higher ground west of the road, where his spearmen could fight among trees and pits and the English could not use their numbers.
No medieval writer gives a grid reference, and the modern site is a reconstruction. The traditional place is the rising ground by the Borestone, where the monuments now stand; most historians no longer accept it for the main action. Two rivals hold the field. One puts the second day on the Dryfield of Balquhiderock, about three-quarters of a mile east of the monument; the other, preferred by the National Trust for Scotland, puts it on the carse itself, roughly a mile and a half to the north-east, where the English camped after crossing the burn and found themselves penned between the Bannock and the Pelstream.
The archaeology has not settled it. Metal-detecting and survey across the area have produced no concentration of finds of the kind that marks a fought-over field, which is unsurprising: armour and weapons were valuable and were cleared, and the carse has been drained, ploughed, quarried and built over since. The battlefield was entered on Historic Scotland’s Inventory of Historic Battlefields on 21 March 2011, with a boundary drawn wide enough to contain the competing theories rather than to choose between them.
The Borestone is a flat stone with a socket bored through it, on the rise once called Brock’s Brae and now Monument Hill, which local tradition made the setting for Bruce’s standard on the first day. The stone was broken up by souvenir-hunters over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and only fragments survive, kept under guard at the site; the tradition itself is not recorded early enough to be treated as evidence. In 1870 the Dumbarton Lodge of Oddfellows paid for a flagpole to mark the spot, and its topmast, with a battleaxe weathervane, still stands.
The Bannockburn Preservation Committee gave the ground around the Borestone to the National Trust for Scotland in 1932, and the Trust bought further land in 1960 and 1965. For the six hundred and fiftieth anniversary in 1964 the site acquired the two structures that now define it: the Rotunda, a pair of curved walls facing each other across the flagpole for the two armies, and Charles d’Orville Pilkington Jackson’s bronze equestrian Robert the Bruce, modelled in part on the cast of a skull from Dunfermline Abbey believed to be the king’s. Both are category A listed. The old heritage centre closed on 31 October 2012 and a new visitor centre opened in March 2014.
The settlement that grew by the crossing became a weaving village. From the later eighteenth century the Wilson family’s mills at Bannockburn wove tartan on a commercial scale, supplying Highland regiments of the British army and fixing many clan setts in print for the first time; the woollen mills employed seven or eight hundred people around 1880, and the last of them closed in 1924. Thomas Telford’s stone bridge of 1819 still carries the road over the burn.
Stirling has since grown south until the two are one built-up area, and the visitor centre stands among houses. What the place keeps is its shape: the burn in its ravine, the scarp above the carse, and the flat, once-waterlogged ground below, which is still the best argument any guide can make for how a smaller army destroyed a larger one here.